Brooklyn Rider - The 4 Elements

The Brooklyn Rider string quartet was set to perform in Australia a few years ago, but travel restrictions meant their first Australian performance of their collection called The 4 Elements had to wait until this year.

This week, modern classical music fans must have felt they were in New York (where the quartet formed nearly 20 years ago), Berlin, Paris, or London, being able to see curated musical pieces evoking Air, Water, Fire and Earth, performed live on stage.

Violinist Colin Jacobsen started the repertoire with his own composition, “A Short While to Be Here”, which he based on traditional American folk songs collected by Ruth Crawford Seeger in the 1930s.

Occasionally, there was a little touch of “Turkey in the Straw” as well as some Porgy and Bess elements and at precise moments, the pizzicato sounded as clear as chime bells.

When viola player Nicholas Cords realised that printed programs were a thing of the past, and the audience couldn’t access their e-programs with their phones turned off, he gave a precis of each piece and how they fit into the suite.

Fire was represented in a new work by Akshaya Avril Tucker called “Hollow Flame”, commissioned by Brooklyn Rider, with plenty of intense sautille bowing, mimicking the dangerous dry wind of a bush fire.

The foursome dedicated the piece to people in California as well as Australia, affected by recent bush fire disasters.

Henri Dutilleux String Quartet’s “Ainsi la Nuit” came next, paired with Andreia Pinto Correia’s “Aere senza stelle” to suggest the Air that gives us life. 

Notes from Johnny Gandelsman’s violin seemed to be carried through the air, continued by the bow of Nicholas Cords’ viola, such was the precise, technical brilliance of the playing.

Featured first in the finale, was Shostakovich’s 8th Quartet imagining destructive Fire.

Written in a hasty three days in Dresden, July 1960, provoked by the ruins of World War 2 bombings, the composer’s sadness pulsed through the cello of Michael Nicolas.

Then Water was represented by “Tenebrae” composed by Osvaldo Golijov, written in 2003 for the Kronos Quartet.

With less discordance than the other modern pieces, there were warm sounds of hope, as though repairing our world after climate devastation.

Golijov has said that he was partly inspired by witnessing our Earth as a “beautiful blue dot” at the planetarium in New York.

Each element was flawlessly delivered by the four musicians, resulting in a standing ovation from the Perth Festival music-lovers.

Brooklyn Rider play The Sydney Opera House 3 March 2024 before returning to New York.

Jane Keehn

Photographer: Corey James